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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140054">Phase Wasps in the Library</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartesiandaemon/pseuds/cartesiandaemon'>cartesiandaemon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Scholomance - Naomi Novik</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:35:04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,548</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140054</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartesiandaemon/pseuds/cartesiandaemon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>El and Orion explore an increasingly ominous part of the library seeking a particular one of Purochana's journals in order to help translate another of the Golden Stone sutras.</p><p>Also, El, Aadhya, Liu, Liu's cousins, and some adorable mice decorate El's dorm room as it becomes an increasingly cosy home base for alliance.</p><p>El and Orion both have Feelings about their place in the world. Nothing romantic happens except bickering and being each other's unexpectedly best friend.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Galadriel "El"/Orion Lake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Phase Wasps in the Library</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/teethandstars/gifts">teethandstars</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thank you to teethandstars who had really inspiring prompts for a story. I really loved how the characters ran away with these ones.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>El's room was feeling cosier and cosier. Liu, El and Aadhya were sprawled across a blanket on the floor while Liu showed the other two how to feed their familiars-to-be. Liu's cousins were industriously painting a riotously coloured mural across the walls with water enchanted to change colour according to how you placed the strokes. They kept making dramatic swoops of the brush that left a new swoosh of colour standing out behind it. Between all of them, they'd managed to make a space they were starting to think of as home, without adding any enclosed spaces where mals might lurk.</p><p>El sat cross-legged on the floor, gently stroking Ms Whiskers' flank with a finger from her left hand. She pinched off a half-centimetre of a crust of bread and held it out to the small white mouse. The little mouse looked at it quizzically as if she was trying to figure out why the giant human was being so nice to her, and then leaned forward to nuzzle her fingers briefly, and snapped the morsel into her mouth. Then she snuggled closer, and gave El's fingers a good licking to see if there were any crumbs left behind. El laughed happily and rolled over to stretch out on the floor, face close to the little mouse.</p><p>"You're good with her," said Aadhya, glancing across from where she was methodically feeding bits of nut into her hungrily determined familiar. "It's good to see you happy."</p><p>El looked up surprised at that. She thought a lot about how other people might feel about her. She hadn't really started to get used to the idea that she had friends who might care about how she felt.</p><p>She shrugged. "I guess I learned a bit from mum how to handle animals, after all." She never set out to, but she had seen her mother befriend a nervous animal often enough to absorb a general expectation about how it went. It was much the same way she'd petted the sutras, and for much the same reason. "We were never very, similar, you know."</p><p>"We noticed," put it Liu teasingly, and El laughed. Since everyone had found out who her mother was El had complained endlessly about the other student's ongoing difficulty fitting Gwen and Galadriel Higgins into the same thought, but it was nice to hear someone referencing it as a joke she was in on.</p><p>The quieter of the two cousins looked up from the painstaking whirling border he was adding round the edge of the mural, awed at this insight into the personal life of a saviour of the Scholomance. They'd both jumped at the chance to help decorate her room, mainly in exchange for being invited to hang out there, but El was worried both might be showing a tendency toward hero worship.</p><p>El held Ms Whiskers up to her face with one hand. "Mum would like you, yes she would," she told the little mouse. Ms Whisker's tail whipped excitedly as she writhed ecstatically in El's hand, trying enthusiastically but futilely to reach to lick her face.</p><p>Then El looked up at the others. "In fact, Mum would have liked all this," she said, waving generally at the room which had slowly been filled with cheer. "Making a place nice with whatever you have. Being with people. I sort of resented all that, when I was little. I didn't understand people. But I guess it sank in a bit anyway." She didn't sound entirely regretful about that.</p><p>After a second the sudden intimacy was too much and she looked back down from the others, but Aadhya was chiming in too. "Hey, you don't get to monopolize all the self-pity. This is nice for me too. I never had many people I could relax with, not since mundane school."</p><p>Liu didn't say much just nodded at them. But she looked like she had more to say. "I had friends in Scholomance. But I think-- I think people sensed something uncomfortable about me. Not that most people cared. But maybe the girls who were willing to be close to me, maybe they were not the sort of friends I would have chosen."</p><p>Both cousins had stopped painting now and were watching silently. This was all theory to them, but their parents must have impressed on them the same sort of considerations Liu had been primed with, and their brains were spinning out thoughts about how they'd navigate years of deadly high school politics themselves. El assumed neither of them had brought their own little cage of malia-fuel, but they must be starting with similar plans for survival, still soft and untested. El wondered where they'd be in four years time.</p><p>She was suddenly struck by a memory. "Dogs used to growl at me, back in the outside world." There were a lot of old memories she hadn't delved into. "I was scared, when you mentioned familiars, that animals still wouldn't like me," she confessed suddenly. Once she opened up her emotional barriers, even a little, she found words spilling out her mouth, words she never wanted to say, and she snapped her mouth shut.</p><p>But Aadhya shuffled herself over to her, her proto-familiar still cradled in one hand, and chucked her gently on the shoulder. "Don't worry, you worked it all out anyway, you big goof. Sixteen year olds are supposed to have regular crises, and that goes ten times for any of us locked in here."</p><p>"Even the New Yorkers do," teased Liu. "Maybe my great-great-great-nieces will come to Scholomance and have a hidden power tap and look out for all the non-enclavers, and have emotional breakdowns without being at immediate risk of dying."</p><p>The risk of dying hung silently over the group for a moment. The braver cousin glanced at the quiet one, they'd be one more part of building the family with that future, if they survived.</p><p>But Aadhya deftly changed of subject. "Have you got further translating the rest of the Sutras?"</p><p>Liu perked up at that. Anything she could bring home of the Golden Stone sutras would be a big win for her family, and the three's alliance guaranteed they'd share almost every asset they developed with each other. They'd all been fending off clumsy attempts by other seniors to fish for information ever since Aadhya first started to arrange an auction. Even some existing enclavers wanted to get a sense of which spells were in the original Golden Stone Sutras as opposed to more modern enclave-building collections, or learn techniques their enclave hadn't shared with them.</p><p>El launched into an explanation of her progress which quickly developed into a gabble of linguistic technicalities. "I translated most of the anchor point spell. It's fairly well known, I found a transliterated copy in a recent book, so I learned more about translating Vedic Sanskrit spells than I did about the spell. The next three were also anchor point spells, but not well known. I don't know if they're obsolete, or kept secret. I suspect some of each."</p><p>Liu closed her eyes like she was mentally comparing that to another list. "Does one of them have weirdly short lines? Kind of staccato?" she asked.</p><p>El made an ambiguous gesture. "It's sort of hard to tell from a transcription, the rhythm is one of the things I need to figure out when I'm translating. But I think so. Only the third one, not the others."</p><p>Liu nodded understanding. "My father told me about a similar spell they were trying to acquire. He said, it was a good anchor point but only in quiet areas, so it was easier to acquire. He said most enclaves hoped to use it, but only for some of the anchors."</p><p>She hesitated, glancing at her cousins who were listening raptly, and weighing up how much she was at liberty to share with the rest of the alliance. "He said, he thought the spell was ancient, but had been modified. I don't know if that version is more useful than the original."</p><p>El grunted in acknowledgement. Liu looked over to Aadhya, who looked like she was doing arithmetic in her head. "A potential trade?" she asked the other girl.</p><p>"Yeah," nodded Aadhya. "A future-trade, probably. Not much use inside the school, unless anyone wants to alter the fabric of the school." They all shuddered at the thought. "But trade a preview, in exchange for their enclave getting first-refusal trading rights after we all graduate. It's useful, but specific. That's good, it's easier to set up a trade without impeding other trades, or drawing too much attention of the wrong sort."</p><p>"What about the shaping spell?" asked Liu. That could be used to reorganize or expand the space inside an enclave, which was notoriously tricky to do without having bits fall into the void.</p><p>El shook her head. "Half of it looks fairly straightforward, full of repetition, but if I tried to cast it it would just blow up. The other half balances it, but it's written in this ritual Prakrit that 'Wise One' Purochana liked to use for annotating spells. In his own shorthand."</p><p>"Can you translate it?" blurted out the shier cousin, who'd been following the technical discussion avidly.</p><p>"Not by myself," El laughed. "But I shouldn't need to. It's closely enough related to Sanskrit I could make sense of it. But I couldn't figure out the short-hand without knowing the language."</p><p>"Didn't you say he wrote other spells in that language?" asked Aadhya. The shy cousin nodded, apparently he'd been paying attention.</p><p>"Yeah, he wrote a bunch of minor spells the same way, but they were too short to get a handle on it, most people just repeat them phonetically. What I really need is his Meditations, or one of his other journals. People use them as a Rosetta Stone to translate any of his other spells, one of last year's seniors did a dissertation on it. But mostly no-one needs to, all the useful spells have been translated already, or more commonly, just written out phonetically."</p><p>"Isn't the journal just in the library?" asked the shy cousin again.</p><p>"Good question, kid," El told him. "It should be. I'm pretty sure I know where too, there's a shelf in the deeper Sanskrit stacks where a lot of Purochana miscellany ends up. I went there a lot when I was working on my thesis. I even think I saw some of the journals, but I didn't have any reason to try to translate them at the time. But recently, whenever I've tried to get there, the library's led my some other way."</p><p>"Are you going to keep trying?" asked Liu neutrally.</p><p>"Oh yes," said El with a feral look. "I think the library is regretting letting me get the Sutras. But I'm not going to back off now."</p><p>"You don't need to," said Liu, awkwardly. She stood to get the most benefit from a translation.</p><p>But El tossed her head scornfully. "Oh yes I do. If I start getting scared off now, I'll give up my strongest advantage. I am going to get the Sutras transalted. All of them."</p><p>The others looked on, impressed.</p><p>"How will you find it, if the library doesn't want you to?" asked the bolder cousin.</p><p>"If the library seems dangerous, Orion said he'd help", she admitted, and Liu let out a noise a bit like a steam whistle. El thought they were teasing her for accepting help, but after a moment, she realised that they saw it as a romantic opportunity for El and Orion.</p><p>"I knew it," crowed Aadhya teasingly. The cousins looked between the two like they were watching a tennis match.</p><p>"Has he tried to kiss you again?" asked Liu. And heedless of fourteen-year-old cousinly scorn, she recklessly went on, "Do you want him to?"</p><p>"He's going to love that you think you need his protection in the library," joked Aadhya. And then she looked doubtful and got serious. "I mean, I'm sorry for teasing, do you really think you need a bodyguard? Is the library really that much more dangerous than usual?"</p><p>El shrugged. "I've mostly been being cautious. But if it goes on like this, I don't think I'll find a safe way, I think I'll need to follow the route I remember even if the library tries to stop us. And then who knows?"</p><p>* * * *</p><p>From behind the shelves in the Sanskrit aisle came a quiet rumble of movement and El tensed, instantly alert for danger. Ms Whiskers chirped worriedly from the top pocket of her cargo trousers, her little body leaning up against the side of the pocket straining in that direction, and El glanced around anxiously for any pouncing mals.</p><p>Orion had instantly turned his whole attention toward the noise, but that was normal for him. "Study carrel," he muttered, and after a moment of listening she decided he was right. It rattled slightly in the next aisle -- or rather, whatever aisle you'd find through those shelves, not necessarily the one they'd find if they walked round it -- and went quiet, dormant again, or moving on on whatever inscrutable errand had sent it moving.</p><p>They cautiously resumed their journey. El's eyes trailed over the books keeping her eye out for any any significant changes or any lurking mals. They seemed to contain the same sort of books as she remembered, and no more fortuitous priceless sutras, although she saw the shelves had already changed more than she was used to, familiar titles represented by slightly different editions, fewer modern transcriptions and more crumbling older copies. She shivered with an uncomfortable sense the library was watching her.</p><p>She gently touched the top pocket of her cargo trousers. "It's ok, Ms Whiskers," she murmured, and then mentally kicked herself. She didn't want Orion to hear her being cutsey with the mouse.</p><p>But instead, he immediately asked "Are you sure it was safe to bring her?" He was constantly solicitous of Ms Whiskers' well-being.</p><p>El gritted her teeth. "Liu said the mice might be able to learn to sense danger nearby. She can't learn unless she goes places."</p><p>"But is it safe?" Orion asked again, but El cut him off.</p><p>"No, it is not safe," she snapped, over-enunciating each word. "But I brought her anyway. OK?"</p><p>"OK!" Orion stepped back from her sudden intensity. El shook herself. She still needed to remember that she could hurt people if she didn't guard her tongue, she couldn't react as though the rest of the world was always an attack on her.</p><p>El patted Ms Whiskers through her trousers for reassurance as they walked in silence. A couple of steps later, "I'm sorry," she blurted, just as Orion turned to her saying the same thing. She laughed, too loud and realised Orion had laughed at almost the same time.</p><p>"We're a pair, aren't we?" she asked, and Orion went "hm", and face went thoughtful again like he was an android considering a difficult puzzle from every angle before solving it.</p><p>She reassured him. "That was a very normal human exchange. Or so I hear," and he nodded like she knew what she was talking about, but there was also a touch of a twinkle in his eye like he'd learned How To Joke and enjoyed showing off that he could participate in it.</p><p>"I'll bear it mind," he said, with the air of one completing an implicit social handshake. And then his eyes glanced down to where Ms Whiskers was curled again, and she sensed he wanted to ask more, but didn't want to push her.</p><p>She took a breath, trying to share some more, to unpeel some of her layers of defensiveness. "A little while ago, I didn't know if another living creature other than Mum would ever care about me ever again until I died." She forced herself to admit. And then she looked away from Orion's face to spill the words while she could.</p><p>"Then my life had, you know, all of you. You, and Aadhya and Liu. And maybe some others. And Ms Whiskers. And now I just want to keep her safe," she explained, voice not completely steady. She still couldn't meet his eyes. "I want to keep her safe, but I know I can't. She's going to get lost in here, or eaten by something, or I'll step on her, or... run away from me and be someone else's familiar, or just something, and there's nothing I can do about it."</p><p>She looked at him at chest height. "To survive at all, I have to use up every advantage I can. To use her up because I can, to increase my chance of getting out of here. It's what I have to do. Which makes me just like a Mal. Just like a Maleficer. I'll end up using up and casting off everyone who cares about me, but there's nothing I can do..." She trailed off and to her horror realised tears had welled onto her cheeks. But Orion didn't seem to care, he just stepped forward and put his arms round her, holding her steady, and waited.</p><p>"There, there," he consoled her with compassion and efficiency.</p><p>She enjoyed the protectiveness of his embrace as long as she could, and then fought her way free, pushing his arms off her shoulders, and rubbing her face clean.</p><p>She glanced up at him. "Thank you, Lake," she told him with mock gruffness, and he smiled. He had correctly navigated a difficult social interaction.</p><p>"I guess we can teach each other to be human again," she said, half-joking, and he smiled like he got that.</p><p>They resumed walking neatly in synch, yet after a moment he resumed the thread of the conversation. "I didn't mean to make you feel bad," he explained earnestly.</p><p>"Goodness, boys can be taught to apologize!" she exclaimed, but when he didn't seem to understand the irony, she sighed. "You didn't do anything wrong. I've just been getting more stressed," she explained. He immediately looked reassured, and she mentally kicked herself again for making him feel rejected. He hadn't had any friends any more than she had, she reminded herself, even if if he had had the whole school dangling after him.</p><p>"You're doing ok at being a friend," she forced herself to say explicitly, and he looked even more proud.</p><p>"You are, too," he said, after an endearing moment's thought when he seemed to be genuinely weighing it up, and smiled in amusement, but realised that had mattered more than she expected to her too.</p><p>"Good-job-being-human point to you," she told him, and he preened.</p><p>He seemed to be evolving another question, and coached herself not to cringe in anticipation. He's not going to abandon you, now, she told herself. And if he is, worrying about it won't help. But after a moment he broke the silence. "Did you always feel that bleak? All the time? Did everyone feel like that?"</p><p>Ah. She still kind of wanted to kick him, but she tamped down a first angry retort. He'd already heard that rant, and done his best to internalise it. Better than the other enclave students had. "I mean... most of us knew the odds when we got here. We didn't know you were going to kill almost every mal in the school for the next three years. People knew we were likely to get caught out at some point and then, well, that would be that. But you know people, we just get on with things anyway." Like that, but times ten for her, she didn't say. </p><p>He waited quietly a moment. She expected him to say "I couldn't save everyone" or "Why didn't anyone ever fix it". But instead he just cautiously held a hand out sideways and she took it and held it. The connection made her feel warmer, and seemed to help him too.</p><p>She let the contact go on for a few seconds, and then slacked her grip. "Come on then. Purochana's Meditations aren't going to find themselves."</p><p>* * * *</p><p>Orion was marching confidently along, when El yanked his arm to stop him striding ahead. "I think this is the way," she indicated, nodding to a cross aisle. </p><p>He backed up a couple of steps, level with the side-aisle again and shot El a glance of slightly hurt confusion. "How was I supposed to know that?" he asked.</p><p>She glowered at him. "Since I know the way and you don't, I thought you'd follow me, not just walk off into the depths of the library." He got a sort of kicked puppy expression at being corrected, and she realised the tension was still getting to her and shrugged an apology of sorts.</p><p>They both turned to regard the new aisle. El recognised it as containing folk charms in a long-dead dialect of Sanskrit just closely enough related to the main branch that anyone walking down it wasn't at much risk of being forced to learn a new language. But it was sandwiched between two shelves, barely two foot wide, and lit by only one floating library light, drifting ineffectually about half way down. That was much more like aisles in the forgotten languages deeper into the stacks than it had been when she'd first used it.</p><p>He looked at it dourly. "You sure that's where we want to go, El?" he asked. She almost snapped at him again, but she realised he wasn't doubting her, he was quite serious.</p><p>"Yeah. Second aisle, just after protection from snakes" she explained, pointing to the nearest shelf where every title contained नाग  or सर्प. "You see why I was hesitant to go down there again."</p><p>He looked up and down the main aisle. "It doesn't look very inviting. You really weren't able to find any other route?"</p><p>He actually looked nervous. "You can't be nervous, can you?" she asked, teasing but also half serious. "I didn't think you'd be afraid of anything down here with your skills."</p><p>"I can't shoot firebolts at being lost, Higgins," he retorted. "If we can't find a way back..." he trailed off. He really did sound nervous, but he hadn't hesitated a second to come with her, nor was he suggesting turning back now.</p><p>"If we can fight off any mals, I think finding our way back is a lot more of a guarantee." He didn't look completely convinced, but he wasn't arguing. She belatedly remembered to answer his actual question. "I really couldn't find another route down there. I've come looking several times, and the library's always thrown up something like this."</p><p>He didn't really reply to that, but shrugged, and executed a flowing, practised motion that conjured a bright were-light above his shoulder. The shadows in the neighbouring aisle shrivelled back a couple of feet, and withdrew up the tall shelves towards the void above. "Coming, then?"</p><p>El looked longingly at his casual use of mana, and gritted her teeth. But she needed the security, and reluctantly conjured a light of her own. It was really a soul-harvesting spell, but she'd finally, finally, got Aadhya to find someone who could show her how to hold it just short of the point of activation, when it devoured absolutely no souls, but emitted a sickly yellow light at an unprecedented mana efficiency.</p><p>Orion was still waiting and she abruptly started walking forward. "Come on, then."</p><p>Turned slightly sideways to avoid brushing the books, they eased their way along the aisle, but nothing jumped out at them so far. El counted off the books as they passed, and they seemed to contain the same sort of spells as she remembered.</p><p>At the end of the aisle, it opened up into another long aisle containing Sanskrit books, but one that seemed disconnected from the main aisles running down from the reading room. Orion looked with apprehension at another dark cross-aisle, equally narrow, across the larger aisle from the one they emerged from, but El started along the larger aisle.</p><p>"Along here, it's only a couple of turns," she announced. Orion looked content that they were leaving the darker passage again, but then El slowed slowly to a stop.</p><p>"Wait, she said, looking ahead, a sickening sense of deja-vu creeping over her. "The library isn't trying to stop us any more," she said slowly.</p><p>"Maybe it's reverse psychology," joked Orion awkwardly, but the joke faded into the dark silence of the stacks as El thought.</p><p>"It's trying to stop us going that way" she said slowly, looking inexorably back towards the narrower passage.</p><p>Maybe it is reverse psychology and it wants us to go down there into the deepening dark, she thought. Maybe it wants to get both of us together, the ones who thwarted it last time, and finish us off, she thought.</p><p>But, "We have to go see," said Orion. He didn't even add "Don't we?" like a normal person would.</p><p>El looked doubtfully about, but the conclusion was inescapable. "We have to go see," she agreed. "It can't be that bad, can it?"</p><p>"Of course not," replied Orion confidently. He stepped towards the passage, but she pushed him gently aside.</p><p>"Be careful," she reminded him, and he nodded, and they shuffled into the narrowing passage together. It stretched on, and on, and El glanced at the books to see if they were being filled in with anything precious, but it seemed to be the more and more of the most mundane dramas.</p><p>After they'd reached the point where she thought for sure the passage couldn't stretch any longer, Orion suddenly grabbed her arm. She looked at him startled, but after a moment she realised his ridiculous mal-sensing had picked something up. He made a "shhhh" gesture, even though she hadn't said anything and pointed ahead, where a side-passage was just starting to appear.</p><p>She listened carefully, but couldn't hear anything. Orion deftly tamped his were-light down to a much shorter range dim glow, and El took a few seconds to wrestle her soul-sucker back down as well. Then with a glance of agreement, they both crept forward to where Orion could peer cautiously round the corner, and with a little squeezing past his lanky torso, El could too.</p><p>At first it looked like the new aisle was one of the unusual dead ends, and then the shadowy ending slowly resolved itself in her vision like an optical illusion coming into focus. A wall across the aisle. Rough and twisting like a giant tree. Then Orion -- without asking her -- eased his were-light a bit closer to the corner and El's stomach lurched as it became more visible.</p><p>A crinkly papery surface of a wasps nest, but more than two meters high, filling the aisle and growing into the shelves on either side, covered in whorls and runnels as thick as her arm. She watched a moment, and the surface moved unsettlingly as shapes oozed about under it. She thought she could hear a faint rustling.</p><p>"Phase wasps," she whispered, at the same time as Orion whispered "Wasp mals."</p><p>They carefully backed away back round the corner. "Can you," she mimed throwing a spell "take that whole nest out with your elite mal-slaying kung-fu?"</p><p>He considered a moment. "I can take out most of it. We can fight off anything that survives."</p><p>She shook her head in exasperation. "Think. If they find phase wasps in an enclave, they send teams of gate guards to search every inch of the place. A few missed burrow through some walls and start building new nests until it's open warfare. They abandoned an enclave in Mumbai over it, until some cousins came back and razed the entire interior. Some of the wasps had tunnelled into the floors and gone dormant there and kept spawning new nests and coming back for years after." She glanced meaningfully around at the ready supply of paper, wood and stone. "In the library, with the school hiding them from us, no-one would ever root them out again."</p><p>He fretted, thwarted. "I guess you can't take them all out either, with all your developing dark witch goddess powers?"</p><p>She choked back a laugh at his description of her. "Nothing I could do remotely safely."</p><p>He sighed, resigned. "Then we round up as many other seniors as we can and come back, try to take it all out at once?"</p><p>"I think so," she agreed cautiously. Then they both looked up as a painful tearing sound echoed from the next aisle.</p><p>El started forward, but Orion was already slipping into the aisle, now sliding into the open adopting a battle stance. She saw a rent in the side of phase-wasp nest writhing as a dog-sized wasp began pushing its way out. The rest of the surface was undulating too as wasps beneath stirred themselves into action, pushing on the accumulated nest material, grave of hundreds or thousands of magical tomes.</p><p>The back of the wasp bucked as it tried to force itself into an orientation where it could reach the opening, and then it twisted, and the rent widened as a row of spikes along its side sliced through them and out into the air. It was a warrior-drone, unable to reproduce but evolved to purely attack anything near the nest, while other wasps scattered in search of vulnerable prey and more dark nesting spots.</p><p>Orion raised an arm and neatly seared the first wasp with a mana-efficient thin green bolt. It went limp. "I can do that all day, but they'll be getting out into the aisle on the other side of the nest," he reported tersely. "You better have a plan, Higgins. You're the clever one."</p><p>She felt an inconveniently-timed blush come on. Why couldn't he talk like that when there wasn't a life-or-death threat in front of them? But that was swept away in a rush of rapid calculation.</p><p>"Do you have the mana tap unlocked?" she asked urgently.</p><p>"Actually, Chloe-made-it-unlock-for-you. For emergencies," he explained in a rapid gush of words, thrown back over his shoulder, while his hands tracked another rent in the nest, ready to fire a spell as soon as a wasp emerged.</p><p>She eased up behind him, reaching round his body to clasp his wrist with her hand, and sure enough felt the roiling flow of mana slide into existence, available for her call. She sucked down what she needed and launched directly into a Sanskrit recitation.</p><p>As the syllables flowed past her, she felt the structure of the library responding to the spell, and once she hit the end of the second line, the emptiness of the void above, blacker ever than the darkness around the nest was undulating, bubbling gently</p><p>The aisle in front of them distorted and faded, and as she repeated the lines with slight variation, the void gently expanded downward, engulfing the nest and the aisle around it.</p><p>Another wasp frantically broke free, and a second, buzzing towards them in consternation, but Orion chanted a short syllable and they both tumbled from the air, stunned and bludgeoned by his abrupt spell.</p><p>His movement broke her connection to the power tap, but she already had the power she needed, and she kept murmuring the lines, not wanting to stop at the wrong moment. The giant nest hung a second, seeming wan in the protruding void, and then wrenched free, tearing the bookshelves it had grown into, tumbling up and sideways into the endless void. But fading rapidly as if it was dissolving from reality, fast, faster than a human.</p><p>El looked along the torn aisle as her tongue continued the repetitions on autopilot. A few feet ahead of Orion the floor and shelves just stopped, like the blank opening into the void in each bedroom. Except that twenty feet beyond that, she could dimly see the faint shape of a continuing aisle. There was a faint flicker of movement, and El realised it was another wasp, a moment later and it had blundered back into the void, and then seemed to lose its sense of direction and fly off above the aisle into nothingness.</p><p>She let her recitation slowly trail off at the end of one line, and she and Orion watched the new void silently. A book lying on the ground teetered on the edge where the floor stopped, and then tumbled over.</p><p>"I hope no wasps escaped", she commented, awkwardly breaking the silence.</p><p>"I can't sense any," Orion said. "And I could sense that last one, on the other side of the gap."</p><p>"Wow," she said, for lack of anything to say. She stepped sideways next to Orion and put her arm round him. He put his arm naturally round her shoulders.</p><p>"What was that?" he asked.</p><p>"The enclave shaping spell. Shaping part of an enclave is tricky work. But unshaping it is pretty simple, just breaking down the structure it has. Just dangerous, if it's an encalve you're standing in."</p><p>Orion glanced at the void where part of the library had been, now a gaping emptiness. "Do you think the school will be mad at us?"</p><p>El shrugged. "I think it was already mad at us. But I think we can take it."</p>
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